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Saturday, August 20, 2016

Thymos Shrugged!

Guardians
of the Inevitable: A global union for mission-oriented undertakers and
realist politicians with a healthy sense of narcissism and a messiah complex.

23:24

Iranian officials prepare the noose for the execution of Balal, who killed fellow Iranian youth Abdolah Hosseinzadeh in a street fight with a knife in 2007 (Picture: ARASH KHAMOOSHI/AFP/Getty Images)

The
Moderates of Iran:Here’s
what it’s like to be a political prisoner in Iran. “In 1988 the regime
executed as many as 30,000 political prisoners. Something which The
British Parliamentary Committee for Iran Freedom recently said should be
considered a crime against humanity.” The people responsible for this crime
against humanity are still occupying powerful positions in the Iranian government.

Why is that when
veiled women like Ibtihaj
MuhammadorSara
Ahmedgets to stand on the podium we can’t control our excitement, but
when a non-hijbai like Dalilah Muhammad wins, the crowd goes silent? […]Muslims,
like all humans, come in all different cloths and shapes and beliefs and
values. That diversity, both inherited and acquired, is what makes our country
so great. It’s something to celebrate, not criticize.

Team Obama sees
themselves not just in terms of the crisis of the day but also in terms of a
much broader, and more positive, arc of human history. They didn’t create these
trends that make this, in their eyes, the best time in human history to be
alive, but they see it as their job to safeguard them.

This results in a
foreign policy focused — to a degree most people don’t appreciate — on protecting this
system from threats. The long view causes them to focus on addressing long-term
threats to the system’s stability, like climate change or a nuclear Iran. But
the flip side is that they’re more wary about trying to solve immediate crises,
like the Syrian civil war.

These crises, while
bad, don’t threaten the fundamental system. And ambitious schemes to solve them
risk dragging the US into costly and counterproductive quagmires that could
draw focus and resources away from graver dangers.

"ISIS is not an
existential threat to the United States," Obama once told the
Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg. "Climate change is a potential
existential threat to the entire world if we don’t do something about it."

[…]

"Compare the
era we’re living in today to the losses we suffered in World War II or even in
the Vietnam War, or compare the economic challenges we face now to the Great
Depression."

In life, perceptions are shaped
by more than facts and they actually, and quite unfortunately, matter more than
facts in determining people’s feelings and behavior. Good politician cannot
afford to ignore this, and cannot afford to let their actions and policies be
dictated solely by facts as they see them; they have to pay much heed to
prevailing perceptions about them. The dichotomy between perception and reality
is indeed one of those facts that leaders need to take into consideration, and it
just happens to be the most important fact of all.

The facts about our human
condition are always subject to interpretation, no matter how objective they may
be. People have different interests, filters and criteria, and they are bound
to reach different conclusions, and that matters, especially when those
conclusions are diametrically opposite.

At the end of day, if the point being
made here is that the price for maintain the system, is to let watch on as
certain parts of the world burn, and certain acts of genocide unfold, and to simply
try to restrict your actions, not to prevention but to protecting the system
from fallouts, there will always be people who are bound to see the system as
evil, and to reject it. Whole, stock and barrel. After all, the system doesn’t
seem to need or want them, not to mention care for them.

This problem might seem inevitable
and manageable, but is it?

Yes, the Islamic State and other extremist
groups that seem to subscribe to this ethos and whose dramatic rise was facilitated
by its prevalence, do not pose an existential threat to America, not to mention
the system, not in pure military terms anyway. But the growing right wing
populist backlash cannot be so easily dismissed. Can we really afford to
dismiss the Trump phenomenon? And would it have been as threatening as it is
today without IS, and the policies that encouraged its rise?

America may not be going through another
Great Depression, but the levels of animus in the current political discourse seem
to hearken back to that bygone era. So many happenings around the world today seem
to do so as well. Identity politics, class politics, and a variety of ideologies
long thought to have been thoroughly discredited, are making a comeback
affecting even modernized West. Yet intellectual bemusement seems to be the only
response that the Obama administration has, as it goes about safeguarding
the system that has already caught fire – the sparks having flown over the established
red lines of containment. You cannot drone-strike ideas and sentiments into
oblivion, just as your military readiness cannot prevent them from having an
impact on your internal discourse and social dynamics.

All these processes are fueled by
perceptions as much as by reality, if not more so. Perception is part of human
reality, and cannot be dismissed as irrelevant. But that’s exactly what the realists
of the Obama administration are doing. And that’s a dumb thing to do.

By some objective criteria, and
within a certain sociopolitical context, we are better off today than we have ever
been in history. Period. Period? But mass slaughters still unfold. There are
still wars and war crimes. Famine. Slavery. Racism. Misogyny. Extremism. And
millions are still affected by that. Hundreds of millions in fact. So when our
political leaders, having acknowledged all this, can still tell us that the
times are good, and that this is the best that they could do, there’s no escaping
the conclusion that these are indeed the worst of times. If this is the best
that we could do, watch mass slaughter take place and wring our hands in
despair, then, humanity, decency and virtue are indeed irrelevant, and we are still
nothing more than beasts. Our inner thymos cries out for justice.

17:47

The Exotic Observations &
Propositions of Delirian Mundi

Known to those
of his followers seeking his canonization and entry into the Valtheon of
Deliriology, as Agnus Mundi, and to his detractors as Ranae Dei and even
Capra Satanae, Delirian Mundi’s writings, mixing satire and philosophical
reflections, continue to be polarizing, inspiring both adulation and
ridicule. Bearing this in mind, we, the editors at DDGD, continue to publish
these previously unknown series of “exotic observations and propositions,” as
Delirian himself referred to them, as part of our continuing commitment to
instigate debate over sensitive issues.

* Most war crimes are committed
by decent people driven by hate, passion and ignorance.

* In wars, all sides commit
crimes, still, proportionality is relevant. Determining the identity of the worst
offender is important in differentiating cause from effect and deciding who is redeemable,
and who is not.

17:10

Putin
By Points

Thousands
flee Hasakah as Syrian government bombs Kurds for third day. “Kurdish civilians
lash out at the US-led coalition for not doing more to stop the escalation.”
U.S. warnings to teh Asasd regime coming after a near hit against American special forces stationed
in Hassakeh ring hollow. This is not just Assad being defiant. Without green light
from Russia this could not take place. This is, in fact, just another round of the
Putin vs. Obama match, and Obama is losing, again. Yes, U.S. is losing on
points, but a defeat is a defeat, and perceptions of weakness, indecisiveness
and ineptitude do matter on both the global and local stage. The SDF is hard-pressed
to act, but without U.S. air cover it will fail, and that will ultimately
impact the war on the Islamic State.

It is indeed quite interesting to
note the difference in media coverage and popular attitudes. But is it the
media liberal bias that is involved here? It seems to me that people reaction
to Buh and his Katerina response was colored by their perception not directly
related to that matter but other policies of the Bush administration, including
the invasion of Iraq. When dealing with perceptions, whether justified or not, accurate
or not, the circumstances of their emergence lose relevance, as they end up
serving as filters through which everything related to the subject matter is seen
and examined. Obama’s legacy will go through similar filters. Personally, my
perception of him will always be colored by his disastrous mishandling of the
Syrian Crisis, and his attempts, ongoing, at justifying what, to me, is unjustifiable.
A mea culpa would serve him much better at this stage than their preoccupation with
seeming smart and caring.

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